The Accidentally On Purpose Cosmos

The Absolute Absolute (AA) is relatively easy to comprehend, since everybody’s got one, whether religious or even moreso, i.e., radical secularists. 

I still remember the day this key opened my lock, because it’s one of those primordial ideas which, once seen, can never be unseen.

I don’t mean to descend into treacly gnostalgia, but I first sighted it while reading a book called The Restitution of Metaphysics by a philosopher named Errol Harris. He was a stepping stone to even stonier things, but just what I needed at the time. 

I suppose Harris suffers from a low-grade case of pantheism, but he is correct that a prior wholeness is pervasively present at every level of the cosmos, from physics to biology to psychology and beyond. To cite a random example vis a vis evolution, he writes that 

there must be some principle of unity, creating and maintaining coherent wholes, already inherent in the process of the world from which life originally emerged.

The same wholeness recurs on the psychological plane because this is, after all, a fractal universe (according to me): in consciousness there is the implicit presence of an

organizing principle of the whole, active in my finite subjectivity -- the whole which embraces both me and my world. Consciousness is both finite (and temporal) and transcendent...

Or horizontal and vertical, yada yada. A note to myself says The moment of eternity is the universal ordering principle which constitutes the processual flow into serial structure. Another claims that History is the time taken by humans to explicate humanness, and a third poses the eternal question, Can I buy some pot from you, Sphinx?

Back to the AA. One of the enduring philosophical and theological questions is how anything but the AA can exist, or in plain English, how creation or manifestation can exist apart from the Creator. 

Everywhere and everywhen man seeks Unity. It is how we roll, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it because we are instances of the very anterior wholeness that pervades and precedes the Cosmos. We are indeed mirrorcles of the One and lonely.

Seen in this Light, reductionism is just a sterile search for unity at the wrong end. It literally turns the teloscope back to front, such that the furthest things look near and the nearest & dearest disappear altogether. Consciousness is reduced to matter, so nothing sees nothing at all. Let those with eyes hear!

So the AA simply cannot not be, no matter how one tries to square that absurcularity. It is Necessary Being, and this is the very Ground we stand upon, and without which we could never arise a'tall and be upright citizens of the cosmos.  

But because there is Necessity there is Contingency. Here things get a bit subtle if not tricksy, but it means there is a largish dimension of -- how to put it -- necessary contingency. 

Don't grab this the wrong way, but one might say that ours is an accidentally on purpose universe, and if it weren’t this way, it simply could not be. For us, anyway.

Rather, it would be the strictly Ab'allasolute universe of Islam, or a scientistically deterministic one, or a Luthero-Calvinistic one of double predestination and ontological occasionalism, or a neo-Marxist one of pure tenured bullshit. No freedom for you!

Now, how do we escape from this closed circle of strict nonsense? Easy: via the principle of the Relative Absolute. But this is my short morn, so to be continued. 

One of my favorite songs is In the Garden by Van Morrison. It’s on a short list of songs to played at my funeral. There are so many versions, I don’t know which to pick, so surprise me.